Aug. 10, 2018 -A team of whale experts has injected an ailing orca with antibiotics in a rare emergency effort to save her.

NOAA Fisheries says the international team reached 3½-year-old orca known as J50 Thursday in the waters near Washington state’s San Juan Island.

A veterinarian examined the orca. The team of experts gave her a dose of antibiotics through a dart and took a breath sample to help assess whether she has an infection.

Aug. 9, 2018 -A gene that helps mammals break down certain toxic chemicals appears to be faulty in marine mammals — potentially leaving manatees, dolphins and other warm-blooded water dwellers more sensitive to dangerous pesticides.

The gene, PON1, carries instructions for making a protein that interacts with fatty acids ingested with food. But that protein has taken on another role in recent decades: breaking down toxic chemicals found in a popular class of pesticides called organophosphates. As the chemicals drain from agricultural fields, they can poison waterways and coastal areas and harm wildlife, says Wynn Meyer, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Pittsburgh.

Aug. 4, 2018 -People are quick to recognize lemurs, thanks in no small part to the "Madagascar" franchise. Despite their impressive media profile, however, nearly every species of lemur is in danger of extinction.

Those are the provisional findings of a recent lemur workshop led by the IUCN Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group (PSG), and the findings have resulted in the reclassification of 105 species as either critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable on the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species.

"This is, without a doubt, the highest percentage of threat for any large group of mammals and for any large group of vertebrates,"said Russ Mittermeier, chief conservation officer for Global Wildlife Conservation and chair of the PSG.

Aug. 3, 2018 -Ruben de Kock has been training South Africa’s park rangers for over two decades — but last month was the first time one of his former students was killed on the job.

The July 19 incident, in which 34-year-old Respect Mathebula died in a shootout, marks the first instance in 50 years of a ranger being killed by poachers in Kruger National Park. Yet given the intensity of rhinoceros poaching in the region, the milestone is as surprising as it is tragic.

Aug. 2, 2018 -Last week angry headlines around the world decried the news that the Trump administration had issued trophy-import permits for 38 lions killed by 33 hunters — including many high-rolling Republican donors — between 2016 and 2018.

Lions (Panthera leo leo) have experienced massive population drops over the past two decades. The big cats gained some protection under the Endangered Species Act in 2016, but the Obama-era regulations still allowed some hunting and trophy imports as long as the host countries could prove that their hunts were sustainable. The Trump administration did away with that requirement last year and instead decreed that it would allow imports on a “case-by-case basis.”

Aug. 1, 2018 -What was once the king of the king penguin colonies has lost 85 percent or more of its big showy birds since the 1980s, a drop perhaps big enough to shrink the whole species population by a third.

In its glory days, an island called Île aux Cochons in the southern Indian Ocean ranked as the largest colony of king penguins. Satellite data suggest numbers peaked at around 500,000 breeding pairs amidst a total of 2 million birds in the 1980s, says seabird specialist Henri Weimerskirch based at University of La Rochelle with CNRS, the French national research service.

July 21, 2018 -What would happen if there were no mosquitos? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed some surprising answers.

There are 3,500 named species of mosquito, of which only a couple of hundred bite or bother humans. They live on almost every continent and habitat, and serve important functions in numerous ecosystems. "Mosquitoes have been on Earth for more than 100 million years," says Murphy, "and they have co-evolved with so many species along the way." Wiping out a species of mosquito could leave a predator without prey, or a plant without a pollinator. And exploring a world without mosquitoes is more than an exercise in imagination: intense efforts are under way to develop methods that might rid the world of the most pernicious, disease-carrying species (see 'War against the winged').

July 19, 2018 -The Internet has revolutionized the way the world exchanges and consumes ideas, information and merchandise. However, it also has its drawbacks. The Internet has facilitated illegal trade in wildlife, which is having a devastating impact on animals, ecosystems and the communities who rely on them.

July 19, 2018 -The Trump administration is proposing key changes to the Endangered Species Act. It’s a move conservation groups say could greatly weaken the way animals and plants are protected.

The changes could limit how critical habitat is designated. It would also rollback the protections for threatened species. Instead of extending automatic protections to threatened species, those kinds of decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis.

July 16, 2018 -Damien Mander has thought a lot about best practices for protecting wildlife.

As the Australian-born founder of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation, Mander has spent the past 10 years working on the front lines protecting rhino and other wildlife in four African nations. For most of that time his work in this dangerous arena took what he calls “a fairly military approach.” That’s not surprising considering his prior decade-long career with governmental and private military organizations.

More recently, however, he began to wonder if maybe “we’ve done it wrong all these years.”

July 11, 2018 -International rights group Avaaz says the illegal ivory trade is still alive and well in Europe after the group purchased 109 ivory products from 10 countries and found that many of these items were illegally sourced from wildlife after 1989. The findings further support Avaaz’s mission in calling on Europe to completely end its ivory trade and protect elephants.

July 10, 2018 -Climate change could make a showy invasive milkweed called a bloodflower even more of a menace for monarch butterflies than it already is.

Monarch caterpillars, which feed on plants in the milkweed family, readily feast on Asclepias curassavica. Gardeners in the southern United States plant it for its showy orange blooms, yet the species “is turning out to be a bit of a nightmare,” says Mark Hunter of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

July 4, 2018 -When Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act on December 28, 1973, it made the United States the only nation on Earth to declare a basic right of existence for species other than our own. Currently, the law protects more than 1,600 species across the country.

Now Republicans in Congress are considering several bills they say would “modernize” the Endangered Species Act to make it more business-friendly and prevent the public from suing the federal government to protect species. Some Democrats and conservationists say bills like this would diminish the law’s ability to protect wildlife from extinction.

July 4, 2018 - For the first time, rhinoceros embryos have been made in the lab. Scientists injected preserved sperm from a male northern white rhino into eggs of female southern white rhino, a closely related subspecies. The embryos were incubated until the cells begin to differentiate, a stage at which they can be implanted into a surrogate mother, researchers report July 4 in Nature Communications.

July 3, 2018 -Narwhals, or the “unicorns of the sea,” could be at risk from additional Arctic shipping routes as polar ice continues to recede. A peer-reviewed study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests as many as seven marine mammal species may face new threats and uncertain consequences from increased ship traffic.

July 1, 2018 -John Wigginton, machete at the ready, chopped his way through the thick understory of privet, sumac and blackberry brambles one recent June afternoon. Logging trucks, bunchers and skidders rumbled in the distance. It had rained heavily; mosquitoes and deer flies accompanied Wigginton on his march through the forest.

"This," he said upon reaching a sandy overlook populated with well-aged hardwoods, "is Tallatchee Creek. It is a great stream. And we are protecting it in perpetuity. There's not much more we can do for the channel, except put more species in it.

June 28, 2018 - In 2019, two beluga whales, named Little Grey and Little White, will be transported from the Changfeng Ocean World aquarium in Shanghai to the world’s first whale sanctuary in a protected bay in Iceland. Established by the SEA LIFE Trust in collaboration with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation, the 32,000-square-meter Beluga Whale Sanctuary site was chosen for its sub-arctic climate and seclusion.

“It’s really important for Little White and Little Grey, providing them with a more natural home in which to live out the rest of their lives,” head of the SEA LIFE Trust Andy Bool told Reuters. The whales are already being prepped for their journey and the colder waters of their new home through exercises designed to increase their strength and their ability to hold their breath underwater.

June 27, 2018 -In a proposal that would essentially end a 30-year effort to reestablish critically endangered American red wolves in North Carolina, the Interior Department on Wednesday announced a plan that would allow private landowners to kill wolves that stray onto their property from a protected federal wildlife refuge.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials who presented the proposal in a news conference said the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, which supports about a dozen of the 35 red wolves that roam a five-county area in eastern North Carolina, would be the only place where they would be safe.

June 21, 2018 - Chris Packham, a well known naturalist in the UK, has recently expressed great concerns over the lack of wildlife he’s observed in Britain in 2018, an island that he believes is now heading towards an ‘ecological collapse’ unless serious action is soon taken.

According to the naturalist, the country has become increasingly ‘green and unpleasant,’ as its biodiversity continues to diminish.

June 19, 2018 -On May 29, the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism announced that the fungus that has killed millions of bats over the past 12 years has been found on a new species, the cave myotis bat (Myotis velifer). Biologists collected dead and dying bats in three Kansas counties and confirmed that they were suffering from white-nose syndrome, the disease caused by the fungus Pseudogymnoascus destructans (Pd).

The next day, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the fungus had been found in South Dakota for the first time. There, the fungus was detected on a western small-footed bat (M. ciliolabrum) — another species newly affected by Pd — and four big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) at Badlands National Park. None of the bats in South Dakota had yet contracted white-nose syndrome.

June 15, 2018 - Sungai Putri, a forest on the island Borneo is under threat, as illegal logging continues to occur in the area, despite a moratorium that was enforced by the Indonesian government to prohibit exploitation.

The forest stretches over 57 thousand hectares and is home to approximately 1200 orangutans.

The moratorium prohibiting forest logging was enforced by the government following a 2015 dry season, when severe forest fires burned many parts of Indonesia, and other countries in South East Asia including Singapore, Malaysia, and southern Thailand.

June 9, 2018 - It’s widely celebrated as one of the few success stories in the push to protect the wildlife we claim to love: Since the early 1990s, governments have roughly doubled the extent of natural areas under protection, with almost 15% of the terrestrial Earth and perhaps 5% of the oceans now set aside for wildlife. From 2004 to 2014, nations designated an astonishing 43,000 new protected areas.

Sadly, there are two big delusions at work here. The first is that designating protected areas is relatively easy (and with publicity bonus points for politicians), but hardly anyone seems to be bothering with the hard work of actually protecting them. Roughly a third of national parks, reserves, refuges and the like now face intense and increasing human pressure, according to a recent study in the journal Science.

June 8, 2018 -The Zambian government has approved the culling of 1,000 to 2,000 hippos along the Luangwa River over the next 5 years.

This is expected to happen in the form of trophy hunts, which apparently even tourists can take part in.

The culling was suspended in 2016 when conservationists pointed out that there was a great lack of scientific evidence presented, which supported the justification of culling in the Luangwa Valley.

June 5, 2018 -A small male pilot whale, found unable to breath or move in a canal in Thailand last week, has died from large amounts of plastic clogging its digestive system. After being found near the Malaysia border, the pilot whale was treated by veterinarians while kept afloat by buoys and protected from harmful solar radiation by umbrellas. Despite days of effort, the whale ultimately passed away, but not before vomiting up five plastic bags. Upon post-mortem investigation, it was discovered that the whale had ingested more than 17 pounds of plastic, including 80 shopping bags, which had inhibited its ability to eat.

June 1, 2018 -Endangered shark fins arrived in a 2,150-pound shipment marked ‘Dry Seafood’ for Win Lee Fung Ltd. The shipment came from Colombo, Sri Lanka by way of Singapore. Singapore Airlines bans shark fin cargo and said they’d sent a reminder to all stations to administer sampling checks on shipments with such a label. They also said they blacklisted the shipper. Sea Shepherd Asia director Gary Stokes told Reuters, “This is another case of misleading and deceiving. The shipment came declared as ‘dried seafood’ so [it] didn’t flag any alarms.”

June 2018 issue of National Geographic -From getting stuck in nets to eating plastic that they think is food, creatures worldwide are dying from material we made.

On a boat off Costa Rica, a biologist uses pliers from a Swiss army knife to try to extract a plastic straw from a sea turtle’s nostril. The turtle writhes in agony, bleeding profusely. For eight painful minutes the YouTube video ticks on; it has logged more than 20 million views, even though it’s so hard to watch. At the end the increasingly desperate biologists finally manage to dislodge a four-inch-long straw from the creature’s nose.

May 10, 2018 -On April 21 the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C., announced that its female red wolf (Canis rufus) had given birth to a trio of adorable pups. Only about 220 red wolves exist in captivity, with the animals spread around the country among 43 institutions, so every birth tends to be cause for celebration.

This time, sadly, there wasn’t much opportunity for joy. Just four days later, on April 25, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that the wild population of red wolves had crashed to about 40 individuals, including just three breeding pairs. That’s down from about 120 wild wolves in 2013.

May 9, 2018 -For 12,000 years, wolves have roamed Southeast Alaska's rugged Alexander Archipelago—a 300-mile stretch of more than 1,000 islands mostly within the Tongass National Forest. Now, their old-growth forest habitat is rapidly disappearing, putting the wolves at risk. As the region's logging policies garner controversy, a new study examines what the wolves need in order to survive.

Largely isolated from mainland wolves by water barriers and the Coast Mountains, the Alexander Archipelago wolf (Canis lupus ligoni) is widely considered to be a subspecies of gray wolf genetically distinct from other North American populations. In the 1990s and again in 2011, conservationists sought to protect the island wolves under the Endangered Species Act, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service denied these petitions—most recently, in January 2016.

May 8, 2018 -People have occasionally glimpsed tailless whales in western North America, but a recent spike in sightings has troubled scientists. This year alone, at least three flukeless gray whales have been spotted near California. Ship collisions or killer whale attacks probably aren’t to blame for the injuries; entanglement in fishing equipment is likely the cause.

Apr. 11, 2017 -Last month customs officials in Singapore intercepted more than 60 bags containing nearly 1,800 pieces of smuggled elephant ivory. To help shed more light on the crimes, they placed a call to American conservation biologist Samuel Wasser.

Wasser is a scientist, but also a bit of a detective. Using techniques he has spent decades perfecting, Wasser can extract DNA from any elephant tusk, allowing him to identify almost exactly where the animal was killed by poachers. “I can take a tusk and I can pinpoint where it came from within three kilometers — and sometimes to the very park,” he says.

Apr. 10, 2017 -Furry, button-nosed and dependent on sea ice for their survival, polar bears have long been poster animals for climate change.

But at a time when established climate science is being questioned at the highest levels of government, climate denialists are turning the charismatic bears to their own uses, capitalizing on their symbolic heft to spread doubts about the threat of global warming.

VILCHES, Spain, Mar. 31, 2018 -The Iberian lynx is a picky eater. Despite its agility and speed, it almost only chases rabbits.

This narrow choice of prey helps explain why this feline came close to extinction less than two decades ago, after disease wiped out large numbers of rabbits from the Iberian Peninsula. But a vast breeding and relocation program has now turned the lynx into a flagship example of Europe’s efforts to maintain its biodiversity.

Mar. 1, 2018 -Sudan is a 45-year-old northern white rhinoceros – and the last male of his kind. He’s suffering from poor health, and if he dies before he is able to mate it will likely signal the effective extinction of the northern white rhino, a subspecies that was driven to its current crisis by poaching. “We are very concerned about him — he’s extremely old for a rhino and we do not want him to suffer unnecessarily,” said the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, where Sudan and two female white rhinos Najin and Fatu live.

Feb. 12, 2018 -A suspected poacher was mauled to death and eaten by a pride of lions outside of South Africa's famed Kruger National Park, according to media reports.

The victim's remains were found over the weekend at a private game park near Hoedspruit in the province of Limpopo. The lions ate most of the body but left the head behind. A loaded hunting rifle was also found nearby.

"It seems the victim was poaching in the game park when he was attacked and killed by lions. They ate his body, nearly all of it, and just left his head and some remains," Limpopo police spokesman Moatshe Ngoepe said in a statement.

Dec. 22, 2017 - A new study from Oregon State University scientists finds that old-growth forests could be an important refuge for songbirds in the face of climate change.

Lead author and ecologist Matt Betts tracked songbird populations in different kinds of forests – including old growth and mature tree plantations.

Nov.17, 2017 - So what are you gonna do?

President Trump on Friday reversed the government’s decision to start allowing hunters to import trophies of elephants that were killed in two African countries, pending a further review.

His evening Twitter message reversed a decision by his own administration over Zimbabwe that was announced this week and promoted as recently as Friday afternoon by the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Sept. 20, 2017 - On this planet, so many plants and animals are disappearing that scientists worry we’re experiencing a sixth mass extinction. Many of these organisms are taking hits from a variety of angles — habitat loss, climate change and more — that it’s hard to get a grasp on how to stop their declines. Conservation success stories are rare.

But sea turtles may be an exception, according to an comprehensive analysis of global sea turtle abundance published Wednesday in Science Advances.

Sept 16, 2017 - They’re the color of mud, and they can grow up to two feet long. People call them snot otters because they’re covered in a layer of slippery mucus. Or lasagna lizards because they have a crinkly flap of skin on their sides that helps them absorb oxygen (and resembles a lasagna noodle).

Eastern hellbenders live throughout the Appalachian region in the United States. Their ancestors have been on earth for around 160 million years, but in the last several decades their numbers have dropped dangerously in several states, primarily due to habitat destruction. Eastern hellbenders are endangered in Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana.

August 23, 2017 - The whale shark is the biggest fish and shark in the world. These gentle marine giants roam the oceans around the globe, generally alone. However, large numbers of whale sharks often gather in areas with abundant plankton food—making them prime tourist attractions. Its enormous mouth (nearly five feet wide) engulfs large quantities of tiny plankton that it filters through its gills as it swims.

August 17, 2017 - At a facility located on the edges of Nairobi National Park, a small crowd of smiling people stands quietly. Adults and children from countries around the world line up along a rope that surrounds a large area of red dirt. Within the paddock are puddles of water, hills of soft russet soil, newly cut branches thick with green leaves, and a large wheelbarrow filled with oversized milk bottles. The play area at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust baby elephant nursery is ready for the youngsters that brought so many people here.

August 17, 2017 - Up to 20 grizzly bears could be hunted in 2017 based on 2016 population estimates and acceptable federally set mortality limits. Trophy hunting is highly unlikely in 2017 because the three states bordering Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks intend to hold public hearings before hunting rules are finalized.

Aug. 15, 2017 - Some Florida fishermen are purposefully flouting laws and reeling in endangered sharks, an important new paper reveals.

The illegal activities were uncovered by shark researcher David Shiffman, who studied postings on the online message boards of the South Florida Shark Club, the largest club in the state for fishermen who practice from piers or beaches. Shiffman examined more than 1,250 posts by these land-based anglers and found evidence of people knowingly catching protected species such as lemon sharks (Negaprion breivirostris), sandbar sharks (Carcharhinus plumbeus), tiger sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier), and three hammerhead shark species (Sphyrna lewini, S. mokarran, and S. zygaea). At least 389 sharks were illegally caught, according to his analysis.

Aug. 15, 2017 - For five straight months, Sheila Holmes slipped through the Madagascar rainforest, 16,000 kilometres away from her Calgary university classes, eyes and feet following black-and-white ruffed lemurs as they flew through the trees.

She's now working on her anthropology doctorate, became a crucial part of what is the longest continuous monitoring program of one of the most endangered primate species in the world.